Categorizing Listing Photos at Airbnb

Large-scale deep learning models are changing the way we think about images of homes on our platform.

Authors: Shijing Yao, Qiang Zhu, Phillippe Siclait

Walking into our new office in San Francisco, meeting rooms evoke the variety of our listing photos in a search!

Airbnb is a marketplace featuring millions of homes. Travelers around the world search on the platform and discover the best homes for their trips. Aside from location and price, listing photos are one of the most critical factors for decision-making during a guest’s search journey. However until very recently, we knew very little about these important photos. When a guest interacted with listing photos of a home, we had no way to help guests find the most informative images, ensure the information conveyed in the photos was accurate or advise hosts about how to improve the appeal of their images in a scalable way.

Thanks to the recent advancement in computer vision and deep learning, we are able to leverage technology to solve these problems at scale. We started with a project that aimed to categorize our listing photos into different room types. For one thing, categorization makes possible a simple home tour where photos with the same room…